I am a milestone (?)

[Velox]

  If it hasn't already, AI War can join the likes of Crysis et al. in that I am now a documented case of someone who bought a new machine just to play the game!  It's true that I can't even finish a 30-world game due to slowdown at the moment, so it's somewhat overdue, but the fact is that I still wouldn't have taken the plunge and ordered a new one if I hadn't wanted to see some AI home stations go bang.  I can't wait for it to get here...

[x4000]

Wow -- what were the specs on your old machine that it was doing so poorly?

[Velox]

     It's an old Pentium-IV 2.26GHz - RAM is "meh"cceptable (768M) and the video board is an AGP (remember that?) 4x GeForce 4.  I think the processor just can't keep up with all the simulation work - it's served me well but it's getting awful grey around the muzzle.

[laxrulz777]

wow... I think my work computer is beefier than that...

bad gamer... baaaaddd gamer!

[x4000]

The processor should be more than fine, I've got some people in a 1.6Ghz dual-core setup that is slow but not completely unplayable with 30+ hours into a 100 planet map (if they were playing a 30 planet map, I think it would be doing a lot better).  But, I used to have a 4X GeForce 4, and I remember how riddled with slowdowns and issues that was.  I'd bet that's really eating into your sim speed right there, because the sim has to wait on the graphics.  You could increase game speed (but also choppiness) using the Frame Skip option, or you could turn down some of the graphical settings such as the background nebulae, planets, etc.  But yes, as a gaming rig it's a bit behind the times, I'd agree.

[Echo35]

The processor should be more than fine, I've got some people in a 1.6Ghz dual-core setup that is slow but not completely unplayable with 30+ hours into a 100 planet map (if they were playing a 30 planet map, I think it would be doing a lot better). 

Key word dual core. He's using a Pentium IV

[x4000]

I know.  The second core is only needed when playing by yourself or when hosting in MP, but I wouldn't have expected its loss to make THAT much of a difference at the low end.  But then again, thinking about it more, it makes sense.

[Velox]

     Aye, I think having a second core to offload the sim thread onto would be huge, no matter what the speed - the single processor just can't cut it, even at a fairly reasonable clock speed.  I tend to give up when a game gets up to somewhere in the 7-10:1 real:game seconds range, so I have a good stock of "Incomplete-nn" savegames waiting for attention!

[Echo35]

I know.  The second core is only needed when playing by yourself or when hosting in MP, but I wouldn't have expected its loss to make THAT much of a difference at the low end.  But then again, thinking about it more, it makes sense.

Yeah, the game itself doesn't use too much power, but the AI Threads do. Even if its a 1.2 GHz Dual Core Atom, having that extra processor to handle the AI is WAY more efficient than trying to time it all on one core. Plus, depending on the age of the Motherboard, I bet his bus speeds aren't exactly wonderful either, so even if the processor was fine it may be bottlenecking.

[eRe4s3r]

Or to put it differently, 5% cpu usage on a q6600 with 3ghz would grind a single core p4 entirely to a halt - thats the kind of power difference we are talking about.

those core2's and now the I7's are entire different levels of pwnage, way more efficient per clock cycle - much higher ram and bus speeds etc. Amd cpus are there too though not as good as an I7 (my next cpu will hopefully be a 8 core 4ghz per core cpu ;p)

AI war really doesn't need much CPU power though, on a q6600 that is. (Meaning i have never seen it become slower than real-time)

[x4000]

The poorer a graphics card, the more load that dumps onto the CPU, too, though.  So that's for sure.  That, plus the various changes of older bus speeds simply do make a pretty massive difference.  A clock speed benchmark for what a game's system requirements are is really pretty meaningless once you go back past a certain point, even if the clock speeds are inline.  That's unfortunate and frustrating both for consumers and for those of us trying to actually label our products with a clock speed.

[Echo35]

The poorer a graphics card, the more load that dumps onto the CPU, too, though.

Ok, its official. You need to make the AI Thread use CUDA.

[x4000]

The poorer a graphics card, the more load that dumps onto the CPU, too, though.

Ok, its official. You need to make the AI Thread use CUDA.

On dual core of any sort, the AI thread is completely a non-presence for sim speed slowdown, thankfully.

[Nibelung44]

More generally I would be interested to know what is the graphic library and development environment you are using? I see you are not using DirectX, but what it is? OpenGL / SDL ...

As for the language, C++, but under which EDI? Visual Studio?

[Revenantus]

More generally I would be interested to know what is the graphic library and development environment you are using? I see you are not using DirectX, but what it is? OpenGL / SDL ...

As for the language, C++, but under which EDI? Visual Studio?

The game is written in C#, and uses the SlimDX library, a wrapper for DirectX.